I should’ve burned everything he gave me. I should’ve screamed and fought, and demanded answers.
But instead, I stood in his clothes. In his house. In the prison, he called marriage.
And my body still wanted him.
I pressed my palm to the mirror and closed my eyes.
This isn’t me.
I’m not this girl.
I won’t become her.
He said I’d see my mother last night. But last night… last night changed something. I could see it in his eyes just before he buried himself inside me like a man too far gone. Like he didn’t expect that to happen. Like he didn’t mean for it to mean anything.
Liar.
Manipulator.
God, I hated him.
I left the room to look for him. He’d have to give me answers. If not, I’d starve myself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Being Unable to Love
“What is hell? I maintain it is the suffering of being unable to love.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky
There are prisons built from stone, and then there are the ones you wear like skin.
Those ones taste like your own fucking name on someone else’s tongue. That ache like bruises between your thighs and whispered lullabies while tearing your ribs apart to see what’s inside them. Was it the heart? Or just an organ that had no right to feel.
I didn’t know what I was anymore. A victim or a wife, or even a woman. I was something in between. A half-burned psalm, trying to remember which god she used to belong to.
Or was there any god at all for ones like me?
The hallways were too quiet as I walked, and the mansion itself was holding its breath, waiting to see what I’d become. The vaster it was, the scarier it was.
I wasn’t sure I could face myself in a mirror again if I passed by one. But I could face him even if I had to swallow glass to do it.
The kitchen smelled of rosemary and heat when I entered. Elena stood at the counter, slicing ripe figs with her usual calm, that unsettling grace of a woman who had long since accepted the monstrous as mundane. I wondered what her story was, or if she had one to begin with.
She looked up when I entered, but didn’t smile. Nothing like I was expecting her to.
“Where is he?” I asked, barely holding back the storm.
Elena wiped her hands on a linen cloth, unbothered, and didn’t spare me a glance. “Outside.”
I blinked. “Outside?”
Outside made no sense. The mansion was encased in sea from the south and hills with forest from the north.
What the hell was he doing outside?
She didn’t offer more, and that maddening silence dared me.
I walked out of the kitchen to the main doors I often stared at. Elena didn’t stop or follow me. I walked a bit more, and no guards stopped me. No locked doors clicked shut, and no shadows whispered warnings.
